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Freedom Readers - Dennis Looney

Freedom Readers

The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy

(Autor)

Buch | Hardcover
296 Seiten
2017
University of Notre Dame Press (Verlag)
978-0-268-16074-6 (ISBN)
CHF 156,00 inkl. MwSt
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Offers a literary-historical study of the many surprising ways in which Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy have assumed a position of importance in African American culture. Dennis Looney examines how African American authors have read, interpreted, and responded to Dante and his work from the late 1820s to the present.
Freedom Readers: The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy is a literary-historical study of the many surprising ways in which Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy have assumed a position of importance in African American culture. Dennis Looney examines how African American authors have read, interpreted, and responded to Dante and his work from the late 1820s to the present.


In many ways, the African American reception of Dante follows a recognizable narrative of reception: the Romantic rehabilitation of the author; the late-nineteenth-century glorification of Dante as a radical writer of reform; the twentieth-century modernist rewriting; and the adaptation of the Divine Comedy into the prose of the contemporary novel. But surely it is unique to African American rewritings of Dante to suggest that the Divine Comedy is itself a kind of slave narrative. Only African American “translations” of Dante use the medieval author to comment on segregation, migration, and integration. While many authors over the centuries have learned to articulate a new kind of poetry from Dante’s example, for African American authors attuned to the complexities of Dante’s hybrid vernacular, his poetic language becomes a model for creative expression that juxtaposes and blends classical notes and the vernacular counterpoint in striking ways. Looney demonstrates this appropriation of Dante as a locus for black agency in the creative work of such authors as William Wells Brown, the poet H. Cordelia Ray, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka, Gloria Naylor, Toni Morrison, and the filmmaker Spencer Williams.


Looney fruitfully suggests that we read Dante’s Divine Comedy with its African American rewritings in mind, to assess their effect on our interpretation of the Comedy and, in turn, on our understanding of African American culture.

Dennis Looney is professor of Italian and classics at the University of Pittsburgh.

Erscheinungsdatum
Reihe/Serie William and Katherine Devers Series in Dante and Medieval Italian Literature
Verlagsort Notre Dame IN
Sprache englisch
Maße 152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt Literatur Lyrik / Dramatik Lyrik / Gedichte
Geisteswissenschaften Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft Anglistik / Amerikanistik
Geisteswissenschaften Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft
Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie
Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie
ISBN-10 0-268-16074-0 / 0268160740
ISBN-13 978-0-268-16074-6 / 9780268160746
Zustand Neuware
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